Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems

by Unknown

  pero siempre a lo largo de la noche y de los ríos

  hay tobillos que sangran, antes cerca del petróleo,

  hoy cerca del nitrato, en Pisagua, donde un déspota sucio

  ha enterrado la flor de mi patria para que muera, y él pueda comerciar con los huesos.

  Por eso cantas, por eso, para que América deshonrada y herida

  haga temblar sus mariposas y recoja sus esmeraldas

  sin la espantosa sangre del castigo, coagulada

  en las manos de los verdugos y de los mercaderes.

  Yo comprendí qué alegre estarías, cerca del Orinoco, cantando,

  seguramente, o bien comprando vino para tu casa,

  ocupando tu puesto en la lucha y en la alegría,

  ancho de hombros, como son los poetas de este tiempo

  —con trajes claros y zapatos de camino—.

  Desde entonces, he ido pensando que alguna vez te escribiría,

  y cuando Guillén llegó, todo lleno de historias tuyas

  que se le desprendían de todo el traje

  y que bajo los castaños de mi casa se derramaron,

  me dije: “Ahora”, y tampoco comencé a escribirte.

  Pero hoy ha sido demasiado: pasó por mi ventana

  no sólo un ave del mar, sino millares,

  y recogí las cartas que nadie lee y que ellas llevan

  por las orillas del mundo, hasta perderlas.

  Y entonces, en cada una leía palabras tuyas

  y eran como las que yo escribo y sueño y canto,

  y entonces decidí enviarte esta carta, que termino aquí

  para mirar por la ventana el mundo que nos pertenece.

  LETTER TO MIGUEL OTERO SILVA, IN CARACAS

  (1948)

  Nicolas Guillen brought me your letter, written

  invisibly, on his clothes, in his eyes.

  How happy you are, Miguel, both of us are!

  In a world that festering plaster almost covers

  there is no one left aimlessly happy but us.

  I see the crow go by ; there’s nothing he can do to harm me.

  You watch the scorpion, and polish your guitar.

  Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch

  a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed,

  and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie,

  you in the Venezuela you inherited gather together

  whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands

  around the live coal of life.

  What happiness, Miguel!

  Are you going to ask where I am? I’ll tell you—

  giving only details useful to the State—

  that on this coast scattered with wild rocks

  the sea and the fields come together, the waves and the pines,

  petrels and eagles, meadows and foam.

  Have you ever spent a whole day close to sea birds,

  watching how they fly? They seem

  to be carrying the letters of the world to their destinations.

  The pelicans go by like ships of the wind,

  other birds go by like arrows, carrying

  messages from dead kings, viceroys,

  buried with strands of turquoise on the Andean coasts,

  and seagulls, so magnificently white,

  they are constantly forgetting what their messages are.

  Life is like the sky, Miguel, when we put

  loving and fighting in it, words that are bread and wine,

  words they have not been able to degrade even now,

  because we walk out in the street with poems and guns.

  They don’t know what to do with us, Miguel.

  What can they do but kill us ; and even that

  wouldn’t be a good bargain—nothing they can do

  but rent a room across the street, and tail us

  so they can learn to laugh and cry like us.

  When I was writing my love poems, which sprouted out from me

  on all sides, and I was dying of depression,

  nomadic, abandoned, gnawing on the alphabet,

  they said to me: “What a great man you are, Theocritus!”

  I am not Theocritus: I took life,

  and I faced her and kissed her,

  and then went through the tunnels of the mines

  to see how other men live.

  And when I came out, my hands stained with garbage and sadness,

  I held my hands up and showed them to the generals,

  and said: “I am not a part of this crime.”

  They started to cough, showed disgust, left off saying hello,

  gave up calling me Theocritus, and ended by insulting me

  and assigning the entire police force to arrest me

  because I didn’t continue to be occupied exclusively with metaphysical subjects.

  But I had brought joy over to my side.

  From then on I started getting up to read the letters

  the sea birds bring from so far away,

  letters that arrive moist, messages I translate

  phrase by phrase, slowly and confidently: I am punctilious

  as an engineer in this strange duty.

  All at once I go to the window. It is a square

  of pure light, there is a clear horizon

  of grasses and crags, and I go on working here

  among the things I love: waves, rocks, wasps,

  with an oceanic and drunken happiness.

  But no one likes our being happy, and they cast you

  in a genial role: “Now don’t exaggerate, don’t worry,”

  and they wanted to lock me in a cricket cage, where there would be tears,

  and I would drown, and they could deliver elegies over my grave.

  I remember one day in the sandy acres

  of the nitrate flats ; there were five hundred men

  on strike. It was a scorching afternoon

  in Tarapaca. And after the faces had absorbed

  all the sand and the bloodless dry sun of the desert,

  I saw coming into me, like a cup that I hate,

  my old depression. At this time of crisis,

  in the desolation of the salt flats, in that weak moment

  of the fight, when we could have been beaten,

  a little pale girl who had come from the mines

  spoke a poem of yours in a brave voice that had glass in it and steel,

  an old poem of yours that wanders among the wrinkled eyes

  of all the workers of my country, of America.

  And that small piece of your poetry blazed suddenly

  like a purple blossom in my mouth,

  and went down to my blood, filling it once more

  with a luxuriant joy born from your poem.

  I thought of you, but also of your bitter Venezuela.

  Years ago I saw a student who had marks on his ankles

  from chains ordered on him by a general,

  and he told me of the chain gangs that work on the roads

  and the jails where people disappeared forever. Because that is what our America has been:

  long stretches with destructive rivers and constellations

  of butterflies (in some places the emeralds are heavy as apples).

  But along the whole length of the night and the rivers

  there are always bleeding ankles, at one time near the oil wells,

  now near the nitrate, in Pisagua, where a rotten leader

  has put the best men of my country under the earth to die, so he can sell their bones.

  That is why you write your songs, so that someday the disgraced and wounded America

  can let its butterflies tremble and collect its emeralds

  without the terrifying blood of beatings, coagulated

  on the hands of the executioners and the businessmen.

  I guessed how full of joy you would be, by the Orinoco, singing

  probably, or perhaps buying wine for your house,


  taking your part in the fight and the exaltation,

  with broad shoulders, like the poets of our age—

  with light clothes and walking shoes.

  Ever since that time, I have been thinking of writing to you,

  and when Guillen arrived, running over with stories of you,

  which were coming loose everywhere out of his clothes

  —they poured out under the chestnuts of my house—

  I said to myself: “Now!” and even then I didn’t start a letter to you.

  But today has been too much for me: not only one sea bird,

  but thousands have gone past my window,

  and I have picked up the letters no one reads, letters they take along

  to all the shores of the world until they lose them.

  Then in each of those letters I read words of yours,

  and they resembled the words I write, and dream of, and put in poems,

  and so I decided to send this letter to you, which I end here,

  so I can watch through the window the world that is ours.

  Translated by Robert Bly

  PART XIII is a New Year’s greeting to Chile, for January 1, 1949, written after Neruda had succeeded in getting over the Andes, and to Europe. He talks of the many South American countries still under dictatorship, “dancing with the sharpened teeth of the night-time alligators.” The United States support of these dictators he considers part of a general foreign policy, policy of an “empire,” which destroys client countries. We chose “They Receive Orders Against Chile.”

  RECIBEN ÓRDENES CONTRA CHILE

  Pero detrás de todos ellos hay que buscar, hay algo

  detrás de los traidores y las ratas que roen,

  hay un imperio que pone la mesa,

  que sirve las comidas y las balas.

  Quieren hacer de ti lo que logran en Grecia.

  Los señoritos griegos en el banquete, y balas

  al pueblo en las montañas: hay que extirpar el vuelo

  de la nueva Victoria de Samotracia, hay que ahorcar,

  matar, perder, hundir el cuchillo aesino

  empuñado en New York, hay que romper con fuego

  el orgullo del hombre que asomaba

  por todas partes como si naciera

  de la tierra regada por la sangre.

  Hay que armar a Chiang y al ínfimo Videla,

  hay que darles dinero para cárceles, alas

  para que bombardeen compatriotas, hay que darles

  un mendrugo, unos dólares, ellos hacen el resto,

  ellos mienten, corrompen, bailan sobre los muertos

  y sus esposas lucen los “visones” más caros.

  No importa la agonía del pueblo, este martirio

  necesitan los amos dueños del cobre: hay hechos:

  los generales dejan el ejército y sirven

  de asistentes al Staff en Chuquicamata,

  y en el salitre el general “chileno”

  manda con su charrasca cuánto deben pedir

  como alza de salario los hijos de la pampa.

  Así mandan de arriba, de la bolsa con dólares,

  así recibe la orden el enano traidor,

  así los generales hacen de policías,

  así se pudre el tronco del árbol de la patria.

  THEY RECEIVE INSTRUCTIONS AGAINST CHILE

  But we have to see behind all them, there is something

  behind the traitors and the gnawing rats,

  an empire which sets the table,

  and serves up the nourishment and the bullets.

  They want to repeat in you their great success in Greece.

  Greek playboys at the banquet, and bullets

  for the people in the mountains: we’ll have to destroy the flight

  of the new Victory of Samothrace, we’ll have to hang,

  kill, lose men, sink the murderous knife

  held to us from New York, we’ll have to use fire

  to break the spirit of the man who was emerging

  in all countries as if born

  from the earth that had been splashed with blood.

  We have to arm Chiang and the vicious Videla,

  give them money for prisons, wings

  so they can bomb their own populations, give them

  a handout, a few dollars, and they do the rest,

  they lie, bribe, dance on the dead bodies

  and their first ladies wear the most expensive minks.

  The suffering of the people does not matter: copper

  executives need this sacrifice: facts are facts:

  the generals retire from the army and serve

  as vice-presidents of the Chuquicamata Copper Firm,

  and in the nitrate works the “Chilean” general

  decides with his trailing sword how much the natives

  may mention when they ask for a raise in wages.

  In this way they decide from above, from the roll of dollars,

  in this way the dwarf traitor receives his instructions,

  and the generals act as the police force,

  and the trunk of the tree of the country rots.

  Translated by Robert Bly

  and James Wright

  LOS ENIGMAS

  Me habéis preguntado qué hila el crustaceo entre sus patas de oro

  y os respondo: El mar lo sabe.

  Me decís qué espera la ascidia en su campana transparente? Qué espera?

  Yo os digo, espera como vosotros el tiempo.

  Me preguntáis a quién alcanza el abrazo del alga Macrocustis?

  Indagadlo, indagadlo a cierta hora, en cierto mar que conozco.

  Sin duda me preguntaréis por el marfil maldito del narwhal, para que yo os conteste

  de qué modo el unicornio marino agoniza arponeado.

  Me preguntáis tal vez por las plumas alcionarias que tiemblan

  en los puros orígenes de la marea austral?

  Y sobre la construcción cristalina del pólipo habéis barajado, sin duda

  una pregunta más, desgranándola ahora?

  Queréis saber la eléctrica materia de las púas del fondo?

  La armada estalactita que camina quebrándose?

  El anzuelo del pez pescador, la música extendida

  en la profundidad como un hilo en el agua?

  Yo os quiero decir que esto lo sabe el mar, que la vida en sus arcas

  es ancha como la arena, innumerable y pura

  y entre las uvas sanguinarias el tiempo ha pulido

  la dureza de un pétalo, la luz de la medusa

  y ha desgranado el ramo de sus hebras corales

  desde una cornucopia de nácar infinito.

  Yo no soy sino la red vacía que adelanta

  ojos humanos, muertos en aquellas tinieblas,

  dedos acostumbrados al triángulo, medidas

  de un tímido hemisferio de naranja.

  Anduve como vosotros escarbando

  la estrella interminable,

  y en mi red, en la noche, me desperté desnudo,

  única presa, pez encerrado en el viento.

  PART XIV, called “The Immense Ocean,” is a great poem to the Pacific Ocean, its islands and creatures. Many of the poems have a richness like the Residencia poems. “Enigmas” is the seventeenth of the twenty-four poems in this section.

  ENIGMAS

  You’ve asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet?

  I reply, the ocean knows this.

  You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell? What is it waiting for?

  I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.

  You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?

  Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.

  You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal, and I reply by describing

  how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.

  You enquire about the kingfisher’s feathers,

&nbs
p; which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?

  Or you’ve found in the cards a new question touching on the crystal architecture

  of the sea anemone, and you’ll deal that to me now?

  You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean spines?

  The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?

  The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out

  in the deep places like a thread in the water?

  I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxes

  is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,

  and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the petal

  hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light

  and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall

  from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

  I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead

  of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,

  of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes

  on the timid globe of an orange.

  I walked around as you do, investigating

  the endless star,

  and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,

  the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

  Translated by Robert Bly

  COMPAÑEROS DE VIAJE

  (1921)

  Luego llegué a la capital, vagamente impregnado

  de niebla y lluvia. Qué calles eran ésas?

  Los trajes de 1921 pululaban

  en un olor atroz de gas, café y ladrillos.

  Entre los estudiantes pasé sin comprender,

  reconcentrando en mí las paredes, buscando

  cada tarde en mi pobre poesía las ramas,

  las gotas y la luna que se habían perdido.

  Acudí al fondo de ella, sumergiéndome

  cada tarde en sus aguas, agarrando impalpables

  estímulos, gaviotas de un mar abandonado,

  hasta cerrar los ojos y naufragar en medio

  de mi propia substancia.

  Fueron tinieblas, fueron

  sólo escondidas, húmedas hojas del subsuelo?

  De qué materia herida se desgranó la muerte

  hasta tocar mis miembros, conducir mi sonrisa

  y cavar en las calles un pozo desdichado?

  Salí a vivir: crecí y endurecido